Google Figured Out How to Erase Watermarks Like Magic

A Google research team found a way to remove watermarks from stock photos.

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By
Avery Thompson

Perhaps you've been in this situation before: You're trying to find a good image for your project, but the only good ones you can find are watermarked. You could pay for the image like a law-abiding citizen, of course, or you could spend hours trying to remove the watermark using Photoshop.

A team of Google engineers found a better way. They used a software algorithm to remove watermarks automatically and perfectly.

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Their approach was to recognize that most image-hosting services like Shutterstock use the same watermark on every single image. By combining thousands of images together, the algorithm can easily figure out what part of an image is the watermark and what part isn't. It can then just remove the watermark parts, leaving the rest of the image intact.

While this might be good news for people looking to get high-quality images for free, it's not so great for photographers and image hosting companies who want to be compensated for their work. Google's method does require a large database of images to work with so individual photographers who watermark their own images are probably fine, but this could pose a problem for larger companies.

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Fortunately, the Google team provides a solution for them, too. They propose slightly altering the watermark for each image to fool the algorithm. Even a few pixels difference between the watermarks in each image would be enough to throw off the algorithm.

Many image hosting companies are already adapting to this potential exploit. "Our engineering team developed a watermark randomizer so that no two watermarks are the same," says Shutterstock CTO Martin Brodbeck. "The shapes vary per image and include contributor names. By creating a completely different watermark for each image, it makes it hard to truly identify the shape."

So while you can't get your free images after all, at least photographers can rest easy knowing their images are safe.